Wednesday, 4 March 2015

Studying vocabulary: plurilingualism, work stations and a field trip

In Finland, most Finnish as a second language
teachers rely on the method of teachingFinnish in Finnish. In fact, this is often
the only alternative when there may be dozens of different mother tongues in
the same classroom, yet not a single language that everybody would understand,
so the only option often is to use only Finnish, alongside with visual cues
and, of course, acting out :) This time, however, I wanted to try a different approach
in learning the somewhat difficult vocabulary relating to Finnish society. This, in
brief, is what we did.

Previous week we had studied some basic information
on Finnish society and now it was time to revise the vocabulary.
I arranged four work stations in the classroom and the students worked their
way on them in pairs or in small groups. I didn't set any time limits for each stations. I was hoping the working would proceed smoothly and that the students would chance stations when they were ready for that.

Our worksheet with vocabulary

Before the students started working at the
stations, they teamed up with a student with the same mother tongue or with a
student who shared a mutual language to communicate with. They then talked through a pile of Finnish terms in a language they knew well. Now I know that some of my
fellow teachers might frown upon this because I deliberately allowed the students to
speak in a language other than Finnish. However, I truly felt it was important
for them to get support from their peers and to define the somewhat challenging
vocabularies in their own languages or second languages before dealing with them
in Finnish. The conversation was lively to say the least. The downside of this
was that I couldn’t evaluate how well or poorly they defined the terms as I don’t
speak the same languages as they do. Anyhow, if there were any mistakes, they got
straighten out at the work stations. My aim here was, again, to encourage the
students’ plurilingualism and make it a resource in their learning processes. I would be very glad to hear if you have any ideas on how to make the students' plurilingualism a resource in the classroom. Please share them with us.

Some terminology

Once the students were ready to carry on, they
could in their own pace start working in pairs or in small groups at the
following stations:

1)Online
writing practise: What do you know about
Finland? Here the students practised writing sentences in Finnish. Now bear
in mind, that this is a beginner’s Finnish course so the task was rather challenging.
What I really enjoyed noticing was the lively conversation in Finnish that
took place when they were discussing the spelling of the words and the
formation of the sentences. We used OneDrive for writing and saving the texts,
and we’ll carry on working with them later on. What I would love to have in my classroom is higher work desks. It would be great if the students could stand at some stations. This would also make taking turns in writing easier.

Students forming sentences together

2) Vocabulary
practise: I’m a fan of word clouds, they are pretty, you can vary the font and
the colours and you can use them for a variety of purposes. Creating them is an easy way to check how well your students know
the vocabulary being practised. Again, the conversation was lively also at this station. It was
great to follow how the students corrected each other and commented on each other’s
work. This time we used a programme called Word it out.

3) Speaking:
Questions about Finland. Here the students had a chance to practise talking some key points we had studied the previous week and thus revise the
vocabulary.

4) Mind-mapping:
The students used Popplet for mind-mapping the key aspects of what they had
learned about Finnish society so far. We used the version that doesn't require registration. Perhaps that's why there is "your name" on each popplet...?

Popplet created as teamwork - still to be finished off

The best
part of the introductory lessons came the same week: We visited the Finnish
Parliament House. What is so incredibly great about these tours is that you can
ask for guidance in different languages, in our case, the language was selkosuomi which means simplified Finnish. Our guide Lotta was
great, she really made an effort to give her presentation in a way that was
understood by the students. I believe they learnt a lot during that
one-hour-tour. It was also great that the same words we had practised in the
classroom came alive in a real world situation.

Getting out of the classroom

What I liked about these lessons was that they included several aspects that I find important in learning and teaching: